In my seemingly endless quest for writing improvement, I return time and again to the three points of my magic triangle: Characters, Plot and Setting. This time I want to look at settings and why they influence a novel so much.

Let me give you an example: One of my favourite stories is that of Romeo and Juliet, and yet I don’t like the musical West Side Story. Why is that? In a word: Setting. Last year I saw an excellent production of this musical, but I still felt the same vague dissatisfaction I had felt as a teenager when a helpful teacher showed us the movie of West Side Story in an effort to help us understand the plot and passions of Shakespeare’s masterpiece.

The story of Romeo and Juliet – to me anyway – belongs in an historical, romantic Italian setting, and no amount of great dancing, fantastic music and memorable songs can sway it for me into the world of warring gangs whose passion and cause is probably even more poignant than those of the Capulets and Montagues. Sorry, Leonard Bernstein – I know it’s just me, but I can’t change the way I feel.  

People often ask me: “When you start a new novel, do you think of the story first and then find characters to fit, or do you think up some characters and weave a story around them?” I can’t answer that, because I have come to realise that I start with the setting: a place that moves me, and then I build both characters and plot around it.

I am a great believer in that old chestnut: Spirit of Place. I love to visit new places and soak up the atmosphere, the weather, the history, and the invisible threads that weave it together. A while back I realised that if I am going to be a writer for the rest of my life, I need to travel to exotic, faraway places and set my novels there.

Sadly, I just can’t afford to do that on my salary and with my country’s diabolical exchange rate, so I have to rely on past memories. I was lucky enough to travel when I was younger. In my wild impetuous youth I also changed jobs every three years or so and started life anew several times in a different city in my beautiful country. Some of the jobs I took involved plenty of travel and in each place I visited, I made copious notes and took loads of photos.

What shines through the most when I look back on these is the memory of how each new place made me feel on first contact, and it is this essence that a writer needs to capture in order to provoke a similar response in the reader. I can’t write about Russia or China because I haven’t been to either. Armchair travelling – books and television documentaries and staring down at Google Earth from above cannot give you that spirit of place that an actual visit can. You need to breathe its air and wonder why it feels different. For example, I have noticed that favourite foods in one place are ignored in another – for no logical reason – and that new tastes acquired along the road often lose their flavour in the next destination. Why? I don’t know but that’s how my senses respond.

A while back I dreamed up a complex plot involving a sojourn in the high remote mountains of Peru, because my best friend had been there. Six chapters into writing the first draft, I found that no amount of quizzing her and reading travel guides could make my words ring true because I had never been there. Since I couldn’t afford a trip there, I had to find another setting – one that I knew.

The answer was on my doorstep. A mere two or three hours from where I live is the magnificent Drakensberg mountain range on the western border of KwaZulu-Natal. Not only is it a world heritage site, but I have been there many times, taken numerous photographs, soaked up the atmosphere of wild beauty and dreamed countless dreams about those mountains on my return home. In fact, I even bought a plot of land up there a few years back for when I retire, because I love the place so much.

A slow process of transition began to take place in my manuscript as my characters and plot adapted to their new environment. Two weeks later I was back on track and clocking up a word count faster than I had done on any of my previous novels. Just over a month later, I wrote those magic words “The End” and my first draft was complete.

Of course, the story doesn’t end there. I have been busy on it for another year and written another six drafts since then. Hopefully all will be revealed in the next few months.

Have you ever been put off a favourite author because you read just one mediocre book of theirs? I’m ashamed to admit that I have. I’m not talking here about when you pick up an early work from a writer you have come to admire and find that it is not as good as her later works – I quite enjoy doing that, because I can see how much that writer has grown since she started. No, I am talking here about when you have read her first ten (in a series or otherwise) and the eleventh just doesn’t match up so you abandon her from then on. 

It’s a sobering thought to realise that there are certain authors I'll never read again. Or at least, not until one of theirs is the only audio-book left in the library and I'm desperate and about to embark on a long car journey. There is a terrifying Sword of Damocles that hangs over the heads of actors, which says that you’re only as good as your last performance, and the same is true of authors. Somehow it doesn’t seem to matter that you enjoyed their stuff till this latest endeavour; your overriding memory will be of their
most recent work and if it’s a weak one, you don’t want more of the same. 
 
What causes this sudden change in an author who seemed to have a winning formula and then lost it between books five and six?

I can’t quite put my finger on it, but if a book doesn’t have the same "grab-factor" that its predecessors had, even if it’s been highly recommended by a friend, then I just can’t get into it. If we as writers could work out what that certain something is, then we could clone it. If we as readers could work it out, then our bookshelves wouldn’t be so full of almost new books that have had only their first three chapters read.

I’ve narrowed the problem down to one common denominator: characters. To put it simply, I can’t read a book whose characters I don’t like. And I can’t work out which character I’m supposed to like if the author keeps head-hopping from one to the other and not giving us much to like in any of them. If she can’t decide which one she wants to follow, then how can she expect her readers to know? 

In my last blog I discussed the magic triangle of Characters, Plot and Setting. An important factor to bear in mind when deciding on those characters is Point Of View, or POV. Which one of your novel’s characters is the most important one, and how can you make this clear to your readers? As a reader, I hate it when writers muddy the waters. If I can't work out by chapter three who the main character is, or if I have worked it out but still don't like any of them much, then the whole book becomes a waste of time, sits on my shelf gathering dust and eventually gets dumped at the SPCA’s used bookshop so it can irritate someone else.

Joseph Campbell tells us in The Hero with A Thousand Faces that all memorable stories have at their heart a hero on a journey. Christopher Vogler re-iterates this in The Writer’s Journey so where does this leave a writer who tries to tell several stories at once, if she wants to avoid a muddied point of view?

That's one of the biggest fears I have with writing multiple POVs, because it needs to be very clear to the reader who he or she is supposed to be rooting for. The Dickensian omniscient treatment of the 19th-century doesn't point the lazy 21st-century reader in the right direction.

I usually avoid reading books that have multiple POVs, and yet I love Kate Morton’s
writing. If there is an exception to every rule, then Kate Morton disproves mine. Why? Because even though she writes in several different time frames at once, she has a definite central character in each time frame and it's pretty clear who you are supposed to be following. She also makes sure that there is something that we like about that character. The woman is a genius! 

Screenwriter Blake Snyder wrote a book called Save the Cat! The Last Book On Screenwriting You’ll Ever Need and the reasoning behind his rather quirky title is this: Early in your story, put in a scene where the main character does something that endears him to the audience and makes that audience root for him. For example, a scene in which he might save someone’s cat. If we can see some act of selfless goodness in a character who may otherwise be riddled with flaws, we will want to see more of that, and that makes us root for him and follow him to the end. 
 
If this character is also the one who has the most to lose or gain, then he has potentially the steepest learning curve and thus the most turbulent journey as well. If we feel that there may be redemption ahead for him, then we’re keen to join him on that journey. But if the writer kills him off at 80% of the way through the novel and ends it with a secondary character suddenly growing into his shoes, we can’t help but feel a little cheated. We all enjoy a nail-biting twist, but if there’s no “save the cat” scene for us to remember about that secondary character, then the author has failed us a second time and we don’t want to read another disappointment from them. 
 
So how does this relate to my writing and why am I being so critical?

Well, some months back I had a few problems with my current WIP. I had muddied the waters and allowed too much concentration on a character who wasn’t the main one. Yes, I liked him (I fall in love with all my main male characters while I’m writing them), but the main female was pale and wishy-washy (as they sometimes are before I’ve fleshed them out properly), plus I hadn’t made it clear enough by the fourth draft that she was the main character. 
 
So I gave this character a major re-vamp by rewriting her into the first person. This made me think about the plot from inside her brain instead of from inside my own. Then I worked out which of the male character’s chapters could be told better from her POV, and rewrote them thus, with her inner emotional reaction to them. Viola! She’s grown a personality and a lot more guts to go with it. And the male who counter-balances her has lost none of his strength along the way.

It all works out much better now. At least I think so. One of these days the book will be ready for you to read, and then you can tell me what you think.

You’ve probably heard about the Rule of Three: if your characters are on a quest, they will fail the first and second time they try something, and only get it right on the third attempt. Think Goldilocks – too hot, too cold, just right; too hard too soft, just right. And so on. Think Cinderella – the prince tries the slipper on the first stepsister, then the
second, and finally hits the magic on the third, when he tries it on Cinderella.

Basic fairy tale stuff, right?

When applied to novel-writing, the Rule of Three allows the characters to have two character-building attempts at something in order to crank up the tension before the third attempt. Complications arise and the story is spun out along an extended road which leads ultimately to the climax, usually in that section of the story which scriptwriters refer to as the third act – in itself a version of the Rule of Three.
 
I have another variation on this Rule of Three. Most writers recognise the important correlation between characters and plot, but often sideline that third vital element in story-telling: setting. In my mind this is also a Rule of Three. Not a consecutive 1, 2, 3, but three points of equal importance. A sort of magic triangle, if you like.

Good fiction writing has to be a triangulation between unique characters, a particular plot, and a specific setting. If any one of these three is taken away and replaced with something else, the story cannot be the same, because its very existence depends on the mix between only those people, that specific place and a plot unique to them. The story couldn’t happen anywhere else, or to any other people, or unfold in any other way, because it is the relationship between those three that makes a story what it is.

You’ve probably realised since my last blog that I have a bit of a thing about art forgeries. I even wrote a book about it: Benicio’s Bequest. But what I want to talk about here is not my book, but my favourite TV series. 

The American TV series White Collar is about an art forger who is released on parole in order to work as a consultant to the white collar crime division of the FBI. My niece, herself a fine artist, gave me the first three seasons of this series and it is now my favourite. The writers of the series have conjured plenty of witty repartee between Neal (the forger) and Peter (his FBI boss), and of course it helps that the actor playing Neal is extremely pleasant on the eyes, but is the gorgeous Neal Caffrey the only reason I like to
watch? No, there’s more to it than that. 

The main character may be a forger, but there’s nothing fake about his hatred of guns and violence. His crime is as clean as such an activity can be, and the action comes not from the usual blood and guts that is the standard fare with most television, but from the convoluted storyline as it swings between cases that both Neal and Peter work at solving, and Neal’s rather more underhand activities with his friend Mozzie. Neal’s fast painting skills and ability to copy with the right materials have saved the day more times than even Peter realises.

When I first tried to analyse what made me enjoy the series so much, several things came to the fore. First, you need great characters that you feel an affinity with, characters that you root for. Even when Neal and Peter are working against each other, I still want both of them to win. And then there’s the quirky Mozzie who provides solutions and problems in equal quantities, sometimes working against Neal, and sometimes colluding (against his will) with Peter. In relationships, never underestimate the importance of the triangle. It doesn’t have to be a love triangle, and divided loyalties can make for great conflict in any plot. 

Second, the overall plot and premise of the series. Perhaps it’s just me, but I am fascinated by the lengths to which someone will go in order to be thought one of the great masters, albeit not publicly. The artistry and dedication required for forgery is no easy task. How gratifying it must be to stand in the background and hear the critics heap praise on a work that only you know is yours and not the work of Rembrandt or Picasso. And we, the audience, get to vicariously share this feeling with Neal the perfectionist. He’s a great artist who just happens to be on the wrong side of the law.

Third, the setting: New York in all its glory. The good and the bad: Central Park, Chinatown, the overhead cable car, millionaire apartments, the world’s most famous department stores, banks and boutiques, yellow taxi-cabs, as well as the occasional sleazy drugstore. Neal’s career started when he arrived in New York and met Mozzie in Central Park.

The more detailed settings include the FBI offices, where the transparent glass walls allow for much casual subterfuge and pretence under the watchful eye of authority – on the part of both good and bad guys – and Peter’s cosy home with his wife provides a haven away from the bustle of his work place. 

Perhaps the best setting of all is the magnificent rooftop apartment that Neal’s leases after his stint in prison. It belongs to the widow (another glorious character, by the way) of a deceased criminal who had an eye for beauty. This sky-lighted bachelor pad has its own unique view of the Chrysler building. What a perfect place for Neal to paint and plan his next work of skulduggery with Mozzie! 

Not only does the series take full advantage of the local landmarks, but part of what drives Neal is that he knows he wouldn’t be happy living anywhere other than New York, and this causes much of his inner conflict in the third series. It is the Setting which changes that solid straight line between the two points of Characters and Plot, drawing them into a wider shape before fleshing out the sides and substance of a unique triangle.

This magic triangle rings true with any good story. Try it out for yourself and see.

A few months have passed since I wrote about the problems I was having with the fourth draft of my novel. Midway through that draft I realised that a major rethink was needed. My main female character had become the secondary character, while the actual secondary character was staging a coup and taking over the book. While I appreciated his input, I couldn’t let him overshadow her. 

I really liked him though, and didn’t want to water him down or dilute his impact, so my female character just needed to be better. She had to up her game and compete with him. Literally. I needed to put some spark into the dialogue and create more friction between them. She had to be the irritant – without being irritating –and bring to the story something even bigger, which he couldn’t provide on his own. So she became a woman with a bit of a history.

Stephen King warns us in his book On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft that: “The most important things to remember about backstory are that (a) everyone has a history and (b) most of it isn’t very interesting. Stick to the parts that are, and don’t get carried away with the rest.” 

Any woman with a history has secrets, and the best way I could find for my heroine to hold onto her secrets was to let the reader into her head. I worked out the significant events of her past, buried them into her subconscious, rewrote her into first person instead of third, and let those secrets fester for a while. And out of that cauldron came a whole new Bad Guy in my fifth draft!

I don’t want to sound smug, but I do love it when the writing goes well. And sometimes, for that writing to go well, we have to let our characters find their own way. My initial suggestions and plans for my heroine hadn’t turned out well, so instead I let her carve her own path and carve it she did. I gave her an inch and she ran those miles. In doing so, she created more intricate threads and convolutions for the plot. In short, the novel has taken on a new depth and come alive again.

Stephen King builds his books on situations rather than outlines. He likes to put a character (or group of characters) into some kind of situation and watch them work their way out of it. In other words, he creates a sort of “what if?” scenario. It’s rather like mixing two chemicals and waiting to see what happens. The result can go one of several ways – utter dormancy; a symbiotic mix; or fireworks. In novels, it’s the fireworks that we want. Right now, I am watching the fireworks grow in my sixth draft, and making sense of it all.

I don’t expect this novel to be ready by Christmas, but if I was the kind of writer who did, I’d be selling my readers short. Call me old-fashioned but I can’t get into that modern habit of churning out a book every few months (or weeks, as some do). If the book is to be worth reading, then it must be worth waiting for the writer to do it properly, to the best of his or her ability. 

My favourite writers – Kate Morton, Mike Mills and Anne Fortier – don’t turn out books like fast-moving sausage machines, and it shows. Their books are well worth the wait when they are released. Even as I read them, I marvel at the time and effort that must have been spent on building and crafting that intricate plot which I know they created for the sheer enjoyment of me, the reader, and many others like me. Yes, they are books that I read quickly – usually because I can’t put them down once I start – but I relish every moment of them. 

And while I’m waiting for each one’s next release, I have plenty of other favourite authors to read, and probably some unknowns that I haven’t yet discovered. That’s what’s so wonderful about the world of books – there is enough space for all of us in it.

So please excuse me while I leave you and try to follow their examples. I have a novel that needs some more work.

Prompted by a recent discussion on the Amazon Kindle forums, here’s my two cents’ worth about writing groups.

I joined the South African Writers’ Circle (SAWC) back in 2007 and am still a member. It has a countrywide membership and sends monthly newsletters to its members. Meetings and workshops are held in Durban, and local writing personalities are usually the guest speakers. Most important, the SAWC has competitions which are entered anonymously. Not only does each entry receive a personal critique, but the winning entry and a general critique are published in the next newsletter. This means that you always have something against which to compare your work and see where you might have fallen down, what the judge was looking for and why he or she chose the winning entry over yours. 
 
For the first seven months I kept my mouth shut, listened to the speakers, fumbled through the workshops, read my newsletters and never entered anything. Finally, I plucked up some courage and entered a competition called First Chapter of a Novel. After all, it was anonymous unless you won a placing. I won first place in my first competition and from then on, nothing stopped me. As my writing grew, I hungered for more. 

A year later I enrolled for a postgraduate course in creative writing at my local university, and found myself in a group of nine writers. Four were poets and four wrote short stories, and then there was me, with two mediocre unpublished novels to my name. Over the course of the single semester, we each had to present our new work-in-progress twice, and to comment on the work of each other. We agreed from the first meeting that the environment in which we met was a nurturing one and that no statements could be made without substantiation. We became close to each other and to our two tutors – one of whom tutored the poets and the other tutored the prose writers. We each met with them, one-on-one, throughout the course.

After the course ended, I knew I had become a better writer, but sadly my tutor left the country to work in another university and my fellow students were not interested in any further interaction, as most were continuing with their studies and didn’t have time. I completed and self-published the novella I had written during the course, and continued to write alone, re-working one of my previous novels.

Around that time, Penguin advertised a local competition for African writing, and a number of writers in the SAWC speculated about entering. Four of us made the decision to rework our current projects and enter them. Although we had known each other a while, by the closing date we had formed a strong bond, due to the multitude of encouraging e-mails that flew between us as the deadline loomed.

After the submission date, we took ourselves for a celebratory lunch, and one writer suggested that we meet once a month at her house with our laptops to work on our current projects. As would-be novelists with a common goal and a will to succeed, we didn’t need to be asked twice. 
 
Like my previous writers’ group, we had a policy of nurturing and helping. The first result of those monthly meetings was that we all began to fare better in the SAWC’s monthly competitions, simply because we had had the chance, during the previous month, to read aloud bits of our work to the others and get useful feedback.

None of us made the shortlist for Penguin, by the way, but I think we all won something far more valuable.

Some months later we formed a joint blog in order to get web exposure for that far off day when all our writing careers might take off. We began The Scribbling Scribes in
February 2012, and have developed a good following since then. We each write one piece per month and although we don’t always make our deadlines, we have a few loyal fellow-writers who contribute guest blogs from time to time so that, regardless of how busy we are, a new blog goes up on the site every week.

We still get together once a month and write, eat, drink tea and coffee, and then share bits of our work that we want opinions on. We have been joined by two other writers who have become regulars. Six is a good number to fit around a dining table and still have room for the food. And we’re all still members of the SAWC. 

I must say, I think it was one of the best things we ever did, getting our writing group started. To anyone who wants to be part of a similar group, I would advise you to join a large local writing club of some kind. When you’ve been there long enough, find some fellow-writers who are on the same wavelength as you and suggest a smaller writing group. Choose your people carefully. If you start off small you can always add to it, but it doesn’t work the other way around – writers are phobic about rejection. We were lucky with our group and are still reaping the rewards.

I’ve finally dragged myself deeper into the 21st century by getting a Twitter account. Having been recently told by a friend that he is on Twitter only to follow the tweets of Stephen Fry, I figured that this might be a good way for me to start too.

So I signed up and am now following Stephen Fry, John Cleese, Alan Davies, Richard Hammond, James May and Jeremy Clarkson. I mean, how hard can that be? Not hard at all, as it turns out. I haven’t tweeted anything myself yet. At the moment I’m lurking in the background, tittering at the comments made by some of my favourite men. Perhaps, for people like me, Twitter should drop the W and call it Titter.

I know now that a London cabbie made John Cleese’s day by thinking he was George Clooney; I know that Alan Davies supports Arsenal, to the derision of his friends; and I know that Stephen Fry spent his birthday watching cricket at the Oval. I also know that Richard Hammond mocked his family’s use of wheelie suitcases, until he had walked the length of the train and was in danger of losing an arm from the weight of his own carried luggage, but what does it all mean in the greater scheme of things?

It probably means that I am more interested in hearing amusing trivia than in wondering about war and peace in the world. It also makes me feel a bit like a stalker. Isn’t that what stalkers do – follow someone’s every move, waiting for the crumbs of wisdom to drop from the lips of the much-admired? I hope that, in this case, because their words have been consciously written and sent “out there” it doesn’t matter that unknown fans are picking them up and enjoying them. 

Of course it’s not just about the trivia. Stephen Fry encourages the support of causes and charities that he holds dear, and Alan Davies has been promoting the performances of other comedians at the recent Edinburgh festival, but Twitter is a strange concept, whichever way you look at it.

Two years ago I remember reading on various places on the internet that Twitter was the best platform for an unknown author to promote his or her work, and then a few months later I read that there was nothing so hated on Twitter as writers who used it primarily to spam others about their books. Of course, I am following some of my favourite writers on Twitter as well, and hope to be amongst the first to hear when Anne Fortier’s new book is available on Kindle. I follow her and other writers because I already know their work and am a fan, but I’m not about to spam everyone to let them know when my next book becomes available on Kindle. There is a world of difference between the internationally recognised and followed author and the struggling unknown Indie one.

I suppose that, in time, I will come to use Twitter for such things, but that day seems to be quite far away still. In the meantime, I’m just going to log on and see what Stephen Fry is up to...